Artist: Serani Poji
Song: The Body of Earthling
Album: Ochamekan (2004)

In the summer of 2024, my mom got in the habit of putting on bossa nova music for guests. It is a wonderful genre to have on in the background, simultaneously relaxed and possessing funky, syncopated rhythms. I was interested in hearing more bossa nova myself, so I started checking out what Spotify had to offer in its “Bossa Nova Jazz Mix.”

For whatever reason, this auto-generated Spotify playlist, tailored to the algorithm’s understanding of my ear, did not solely offer Brazilian mainstays of the genre like Antonio Carlos Jobim. In fact, a majority of the music was actually Japanese. And one song in particular caught my ear very early: the unusually groovy The Body of Earthling by Japanese band Serani pOji

It is a song that uniquely lends itself to dancing, although one does feel inclined to move their feet very fast in order to keep up with the samba percussion. Vocalist Yumi Higashino’s light, innocent vocals add a wonderful counterpoint to the inexorable force of the rhythm, creating a thoroughly unusual song, at least to my western ear.

RateYourMusic says that this album’s primary genre is Akishibu-kei, which it defines as “a style of Japanese Pop, born as a mixture of Shibuya-kei music stylings with the otaku sensibilities of the Akihabara subculture in Tokyo.” This makes a lot of sense because Serani Poji was actually led by Tomoko Sasaki, a longtime composer for video games created by SEGA and others.

There’s lots of great “Japanese bossa nova” out there. Serani Poji’s music is frenetic end and sounds almost 8-bit, but lots of other artists hew closer to bossa nova’s more chilled-out roots. The band Lamp is a particularly good example of this.